Apple doesn’t even make it to a footnote in computer history without Steve Jobs. Technologies are not quite dime a dozen. People who know how to blend invention with the needs of the market are rare.
My suspicion is that there are many a person listed in the credits at the end of Nightstalker who have the same kind of willingness to sell their soul in pursuit of their ambitions. The film is, on the one hand, about the capitalist spirit, and on the other one of the creepiest film I have seen in years. It is brilliantly done [Rotten Tomatoes: 95% for critics; 87% for the audience, IMDb: 8.1]. It is about running a business, taking your opportunities where you find them, the application of cost-benefit analysis, the reality of price setting, business management, motivation for both self and one’s employees, and much more along these lines.
The underlying thoughts and words spoken by Jake Gyllenhaal are right out of Peter Drucker and the latest manual on how to succeed in business. Their application in a most unusual setting, which is itself a revelation. About lots of things but mostly for its entertainment. Its take on the capitalist system by the multi-millionaire far left capitalists of the film industry is itself a parody of the highest order, not that they would see it themselves.
But what the film does particularly well is remind us that a market system is built on the presumption of a moral order in the universe. No one watching the film would be in any doubt that the actions taken are morally wrong. The system we live in works only because there are these codes of ethics that are imposed by all of us on each of us. The film is a fantasy, a kind of dystopian version of how the market works.
The US is no longer a country, a unified coherent whole, the homeland of a people with a common history and a common purpose. Large parts of its landmass is instead being turned into a campsite, where the campers are given votes so that the productive can keep passing on a significant part of their incomes to the government to bribe the new campers with. Here’s the story: Obama opens fraud-ridden benefits programs to illegal immigrants:
President Obama’s unilateral executive action on immigration will make hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, illegal immigrants eligible for federal transfer payments. That will be done primarily through two widely used programs — the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, and the Additional Child Tax Credit, or ACTC.
As it turns out, those two programs are already among the most corrupt and fraud-ridden in the entire federal government. A newly-released report from the inspector general of the Internal Revenue Service confirms that the EITC is plagued by fraud (which was already well known) and also reveals for the first time that the ACTC is even worse.
The two programs, intended for low-income workers, are what is known as refundable tax credits. That means they give workers a tax refund that is larger than their tax liability. So a family with a tax bill of $1,000 might receive an EITC “refund” of $5,000, meaning the family doesn’t write a check to the government but rather receives a check from the government. The ACTC works similarly for low-income workers with children.
Supported by both political parties over the years, the programs were intended to encourage work and strengthen families. Their growth has been extraordinary in recent years — payments increased 40 percent from 2007 to 2012 alone. And now both are beset by staggering levels of fraud. . . .
In fact, the president obscured what is happening by telling the covered illegal immigrants that if “you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to stay. …” In fact, for many of those affected, “willing to pay your fair share of taxes” actually means “willing to accept an assistance check from the government.”
If past practice is any guide, the Obama administration will likely start an aggressive, multilingual campaign to encourage illegal immigrants affected by the president’s action to apply for as many benefits as possible. And if not all of them are actually eligible to receive the taxpayers’ money? Well, no one will be checking that too closely.
You tell me where this ends? That the productive will forever remain content to share their wealth with millions of others who have not contributed a single dollar over and above what they have taken is not a longterm proposition. How and what circumstances will bring it to an end will remain the mystery for now, but I suspect not for long.
You want evidence that we are being driven into a lower standard of living? Try this:
Mr Stevens, who has consistently maintained the currency is materially overvalued, said a number in the vicinity of US75c seemed an appropriate valuation, which means the currency would need to fall a further 9 per cent from current level.
“I think it’s quite likely that it will, a year from now, be lower than it is today,” Mr Stevens told The Australian Financial Review.
“A year ago I said probably 85 US cents was better than 95. And if I had to pick a figure now, I would say probably 75 is better than 85.”
The Treasurer’s parliamentary secretary, Steven Ciobo, said the Australian dollar was “still at historically high levels”.
“Over the longer term we do need the Australian dollar to come down further,” he told ABC Radio.
“By doing that, it will help the Australian economy to transition from being focused too heavily on mining, to being refocused again more broadly on the services side of the economy, which of course accounts for the vast bulk of the Australian economy.”
We are looking at a major drop in living standards that no one is doing a thing to resist. Fire sale prices on what we sell with major increases in the prices of what we buy. This is all round bad advice, but if the RBA intends to engineer us into this loss of wealth and income, at least the government could do something about its own level of spending, our bizarre industrial relations straight jacket and the regulations that are preventing expansion by those firms still willing to give it a go.
Meanwhile, how will anyone thinking about what to do react to hearing that the dollar might be falling another ten or so percent. The instability of such kind of talk will freeze this economy up so that no one will do a thing until the air has finally cleared.
Tim Blair has gone after the critics of Hal Colebatch’s Australia’s Secret War: How Unionists Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II which had the audacity to win the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, or at least shared one with someone else. This has apparently sent the unusual suspects off into a frenzy.
What is astonishing to me is that the sabotage continued past the Soviet Union entering the War. We had the same problem in Canada, but the moment that the Soviet motherland was under attack, everything changed in a nanosecond. That unions were still at it in Australia long after, and especially out here where we were all by ourselves in the South Pacific, shows an insanity that defies description.
Yet in the Orwellian world we seem to inhabit, apparently nothing is ever settled if it in any way is discrediting to the left. You cannot even mention that Alger Hiss was just maybe perhaps possibly a Soviet agent without bringing half the world down on your head. So I won’t.
The interesting part about this episode is that the left understands how important it is to fortify the line and never concede anything ever no matter what. The critics of Colebatch’s book would have to do an awful lot of research to seriously erode the evidence that has been brought together by a serious scholar, which is what Hal Colebatch is. It is the usual demonstration effect. Do not go there if you know what’s good for you. So once again I won’t.
That Julie Bishop is a political genius. At the moment, the third world is in pursuit of handouts from the first world to encourage these poorer nations along the road towards a greener, less carbonated future. So far as these third world countries are concerned, it is all upside with nothing to lose. Pretend there’s global warming, that they are in danger and then collect billions (trillions?) from the wealthier nations on the planet, at least the ones that are currently wealthier. So she has put the fox into the chicken coop so to speak:
AUSTRALIA has called on China and India to do more to combat climate change as it prepares to challenge the notion that developing countries should have less onerous obligations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
During a meeting on the sidelines of the UN Climate Change Conference in the Peruvian capital, Lima, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop yesterday urged the vice-chair of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Xie Zhenhua, to do more to tackle emissions reductions.
Ms Bishop plans to tell the conference today that the binary definition of developed and developing countries “is misleading and doesn’t lead to best outcomes’’ in combating climate change “because the divide is arbitrary”.
“It doesn’t matter where the emissions come from, they are global emissions,’’ she will say.
After her meeting with Mr Xie, Ms Bishop told The Australian: “I said I thought there would be more China could do to reduce its emissions and that it was not appropriate for China to be claiming to be a developing country.”
Genius. Pure Alinsky. Make them live up to their professed positions on global warming, which everyone knows is nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more. Press them on doing something positive this side of 2034. This is the shortcut to causing the whole system to break down while pretending to do all you can to limit carbon emissions. Very clever when you perfectly well understand that global warming is all nonsense, an academic scam that got out of hand.
All very clever, that is, unless you happen to believe it yourself which, surely, she does not.
You should ride with this one to the end. It is only 6:36.
I saw this at Andrew Bolt and it is absolutely perfect. Labor’s Catherine King claims government spending isn’t the same as taxpayers’ spending. Here are the quotes which could be made by anyone on the Labor front bench (and by all too many in the Coalition):
Is healthcare important in this country? Yes it is. Who pays for it? We think it is perfectly possible … for the government to continue to contribute alongside our taxpayers as they do both through the Medicare levy, Medicare levy surcharge and of course through general taxation to continue to have a sustainable Medicare system. . . .
When the Government points out that the co-payment will at least pay for a new $20 billion medical research fund, Labor health spokeswoman Catherine King tells the Government to keep the fund but ditch the tax to pay for it, claiming the Government could somehow “find the money from consolidated revenue”. You know, the great big money pot that magically refills?
One of the many problems that have been caused by Keynesian theory is to have substituted thinking in terms of money for thinking in terms of productive inputs. She sees no end to the money tree. Just keep printing and we can have everything. What she misses are the severe limitations on the productive real side of the economy.
Yet the undeniable fact is that there are a finite number of doctor-hours available across the economy, and these can only be expanded, over time, by reducing the number of other-profession-hours available. And there are only so many nurses-hours available and hospital-bed-nights available and ambulance-hours available, with none of these expandable other than incrementally and at huge cost in the other things we might do instead, like build schools, or roads, or trains, or submarines or anything else, like medical research, let us say.
I suspect that she and her colleagues are so dazzled by the billions they get to spend that they think there are no limits that matter. The reality is that she is so out of her depth, like so many of her colleagues, that they end up creating the fiscal mess that Julia and Kevin have left behind. It is a scandal, of course, but the level of economic education is now so low that even half the economists we graduate would not be able to immediately see the flaws in the arguments Catherine has made.
Her Majesty raised the issue herself. Why hadn’t the world’s economists predicted the global financial crisis? Had she asked me, my answer would have been that such things are beyond the abilities of anyone, and if someone tells you different, they are only kidding themselves. And I say this as the AFR Forecaster of the Year in 1988, which I received for being the only economist in Australia to say that Australia would, under virtually no circumstances I could think of, have a recession that year. Everyone else thought the probability was high, so I won by default.
The sad part is that economics has now in many ways been reduced to forecasting a narrow range of published national statistics, as if that were the true issue. What economists should be doing instead is working out the best way to achieve community goals, by putting institutional structures in place that create the wealth we can all then partake of, most helpfully by participating in the wealth creation process.
Why this has come to mind are the latest ructions in the market for oil, that no one – NO ONE – could have forecast a year or so ago. And certainly no one did. Here is the article that has brought this to mind: Bank of America sees $50 oil as Opec dies.
The Opec oil cartel no longer exists in any meaningful sense and crude prices will slump to $50 a barrel over coming months as market forces shake out the weakest producers, Bank of America has warned.
Revolutionary changes sweeping the world’s energy industry will drive down the price of liquefied natural gas (LNG), creating a “multi-year” glut and a mucher cheaper source of gas for Europe.
Francisco Blanch, the bank’s commodity chief, said Opec is “effectively dissolved” after it failed to stabilize prices at its last meeting. “The consequences are profound and long-lasting,“ he said.
The free market will now set the global cost of oil, leading to a new era of wild price swings and disorderly trading that benefits only the Mid-East petro-states with deepest pockets such as Saudi Arabia. If so, the weaker peripheral members such as Venezuela and Nigeria are being thrown to the wolves.
Of course, these are forecasts made in December 2014. And if you don’t like this one, come back tomorrow and I will give you another.
Law of Markets 